Here is your Riskalyze Fintech Five for February, a focused take on what we think are the recent top five stories in wealth management technology.
FNZ Acquires YieldX
Our first story is FNZ’s acquisition of the fast-growing digital fixed income platform YieldX.
This purchase gives FNZ a powerful set of tools to build, optimize and manage fixed-income portfolios while bringing on a deep bench of wealth management talent. As part of the acquisition, YieldX CEO Adam Green will join FNZ as CEO of Asset Management, and YieldX President Steve Gross will join as Head of Asset Management Strategy.
With FNZ's new global partnership with Envestnet, their acquisition of State Street’s US custody business, and now YieldX’s fixed income technology, this is a really interesting company to watch.
Asset-Map Partners with Cetera
In terrific news for our friends and partners at both Asset-Map and Cetera, the two companies have announced a deal to open up Asset-Map’s visual mapping tool to Cetera’s 8,000 advisors (Asset-Map also just announced $6 million funding too!). And by the way—breaking news—Cetera just acquired Securian’s wealth management business, so make that over 9,000 advisors!
Huge congrats to Cetera CEO Adam Antoniades, who has been at the bleeding edge of turning the firm into one of the industry’s most prolific acquirers, and a focused partner of great technology firms.
Elements Raises $5 Million in Funding From Flyover Capital
Elements, next-gen financial monitoring and planning software, announced a $5 million dollar financing round. The round was led by Flyover Capital, the venture capital firm closely tied to prolific wealth management entrepreneur Marty Bicknell, and a backer of other wealth tech firms like Snappy Kraken.
Elements now counts over 260 firms as clients, and this new capital brings the company’s total funding to more than $9 million.
ChatGPT as Your Financial Advisor?
Artificial intelligence has been taking the Internet by storm during the last few weeks as OpenAI released ChatGPT, a conversational natural language chatbot trained on a broad swath of Internet knowledge and capable of creatively expressing a variety of knowledge.
While some call ChatGPT a potential Google killer, others have started speculating whether it could put financial advisors out of business. But have no fear—despite a decade or two of the financial advice industry telling itself that portfolio construction is commoditized, when ChatGPT was recently asked to build one, it responded that it was impossible due to too many unpredictable variables.
I think smart humans have a long future in financial advice for some time to come.
Gavin, You Will Be Missed
Our last story of the day will end this Fintech 5 on a somber note. Longtime president of Wealth Consulting Partners and advisor technology expert, Gavin Spitzner, passed away on January 30th after a courageous battle with cancer.
News of his diagnosis shocked the profession last summer, and we all had such high hopes for Gavin’s complete and full recovery. Our profession will not soon forget his kindness, his intelligence, and the courage with which he fought this disease.
I hope his wife and kids know what a profound impact he made on so many people in our profession. May his memory be a blessing to us all.
Watch Past Episodes of the Fintech 5.
